Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘He’s leaving it a bit–’ I began, then broke off as the thing slammed into the daemon without slowing at all, mashing her into the deck, crushing and bursting flesh and bone as it did so. It seemed Emeli wasn’t quite as invincible as she’d thought she was. ‘What the hell is that?’

Whatever it was, the thing must have stood twice as tall as a man, at the very least. In contrast to the bright colours I generally associated with the eldar, however, it was dull of hue, composed of dark unpolished metal, and even from this distance I could feel the furnace heat radiating from it. My first guess, that it was some kind of Dreadnought, was clearly wide of the mark.

‘It’s complicated,’ Amberley said.

‘Is it alive?’ I asked. The thing was looking at us with a gleam of malign intelligence, but its stillness was preternatural, as though a statue had somehow been imbued with will and intellect.190

‘Sort of,’ Amberley said, unhelpfully, but before I could pursue the topic, the flesh of Emeli’s new body began to reconstruct itself, flowing smoothly back into its former configuration. ‘They call it an avatar.’

The avatar took up a guard position, moving lithely through a series of defensive postures, an ancient-looking pole arm encrusted with runes locked in its metal hands.

‘That was mean,’ Emeli said, flexing her newly reconstituted neck, and lashing out at the thing with staggering speed and power. The avatar dodged the blow, its comparatively small stature191 a distinct advantage in that regard, and lashed out with its archaic-seeming weapon. The blade bit deep into the daemon’s thigh, and Emeli squealed, more in outrage than in pain, lashing out again with a kick which sent the avatar reeling. The wound it had inflicted began to knit together, but a good deal more slowly than the ones my chainsword had made.

‘She’s weakening,’ I said, as the eldar construct returned to the attack, leaping into the air to drive a slashing blow down through the daemon’s torso. Once again the wound began to heal, but even more sluggishly – as did the ones being inflicted by the whirling sorcerous spears, and the las-bolts from the circling warlocks began to leave short-lived pock marks before the skin smoothed over again.

‘The spirit stones must be getting depleted,’ Amberley said. ‘But she can still draw enough power from them to hold her own.’ She tried to sound casual, but I knew her well enough to realise just how worried she was becoming. ‘The avatar should wear her down eventually, though.’

‘We don’t have long enough for eventually,’ I reminded her. ‘The air’s still venting.’

‘Good point,’ she said decisively, with a glance at her prostrate colleague. ‘You and Jurgen carry Vekkman. Once we’re through the airlocks I’ll order the defence batteries to flatten the whole dome.’

Which sounded like a great plan to me, and I lost no time in saying so. Amberley shook her head.

‘It still might not be enough to banish such a powerful daemon,’ she said, ‘and it’ll probably hack off the eldar so much they’ll take out the entire orbital in a hissy fit.’ She shrugged. ‘But it’s the only option I can see. While she’s linked to the stones–’

Sudden realisation burst in my head, the thought I’d had before coming abruptly into focus.

‘Jurgen can block the link,’ I said. ‘Like he did with Rakel.’ I turned to my aide. ‘We need to get to those stones. Now.’

‘Very good, sir,’ he replied, as phlegmatic as ever, and began running straight towards them, heedless of the battling behemoths in between.

‘Stick with him,’ Amberley said, but I was running after my aide even before she’d finished speaking, decades of experience having shown me that in situations like this the closer I was to Jurgen the safer I was liable to be; although in this case, safety was a pretty relative term. I dodged the sweep of the avatar’s pole arm, feeling the blistering heat of the thing’s metal body shrivel the hairs on the nape of my neck as it charged past, then ducked and rolled as Emeli’s tail192 nearly took my head off. The swooping eldar weren’t exactly helping either, the occasional las-bolt hitting the ground around us as we ran, although the towering daemon was a pretty hard target to miss. As I hit the ground I found the eldritch weapon Vekkman had been waving about close to my hand, and seized it instinctively, dropping my chainsword in order to do so, swinging it experimentally as I regained my feet. It felt curiously light for its size, but it had been able to affect the towering daemon in some way, which my old familiar weapon most definitely hadn’t. I fumbled for an activation rune, failed to find one, and hoped that whatever it did was somehow innate to it.